"I may have lost contact with reality for a second or two--oh, nothing of the I-just-blacked-out sort that your common criminal enacts; on the contrary, I want to stress the fact that I was responsible for every shed drop of his bubbleblood; but a kind of momentary shift occurred as if I were in the connubial bedroom, and Charlotte were sick in bed. Quilty was a very sick man. I held one of his slippers instead of the pistol--I was sitting on the pistol. Then I made myself a little more comfortable in the chair near the bed, and consulted my wrist watch. The crystal was gone but it ticked.The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. My hands were hardly in better condition than his. I washed up as best I could in the adjacent bathroom. Now I could leave. As I emerged on the landing, I was amazed to discover that a vivacious buzz I had just been dismissing as a mere singing in my ears was really a medley of voices and radio music coming from the downstairs,"(304).
Humbert has just murdered Quilty, who had "taken" Lolita away from him. Humbert had shot him in cold blood after a short struggle between the two. What was very disturbing is that after shooting him, Humbert was disappointed that he did not feel any relief that he was hoping he would have felt. He even tried to make himself more comfortable in the same room. He sees that a quarter of his face has been blasted off, yet Humbert still makes a mental note of not wanting to check if he was dead. Considering Humbert pursued relations with a young girl, this would lead me to believe that he was mentally ill, and his emotionless state after killing another man in cold blood, confirms my thought.
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